After his surprise triple victories in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri, Rick Santorum has begun soaring among Republican primary voters, erasing Mitt Romney’s lead in the race for the party’s presidential nomination.

A New York Times/CBS News poll released Tuesday morning showed Mr. Santorum surging among Republican primary voters nationwide, lifted by support among conservatives, evangelical Christians and Tea Party supporters.

In the new poll, 30 percent of Republican primary voters say they support Mr. Santorum, compared with 27 percent for Mr. Romney. While Mr. Santorum’s lead is essentially a tie with Mr. Romney because it is within the margin of sampling error, it reflects a significant jump for him from earlier polls.

The two other major candidates are further behind, at 12 percent for Ron Paul and 10 percent for Newt Gingrich. Mr. Gingrich’s numbers have fallen sharply since his win in South Carolina on Jan. 21…

Newt who?

And of course, therein lies the cautionary tale for Santorum. Several weeks back (starting the week before the SC primary), we saw Gingrich catching up to Romney in national polls.

All Romney can say in defense of his status is that he is always the guy the other people are talking about catching.

So what do you think? Is this real, or just another one of these whack-a-mole upsurges of the “not-Romney” flavor of the week?

10 thoughts on “Santorum catching up to Romney in national poll”

How easily some [you, Brad] seem to dismiss one of our strongest vectors of historical knowledge!

Assassinate Newt’s personality if you must, but as President Reagan often noted John Adams’ well-known quotation, “Facts are stubborn things […; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.]”

Well, again, as an Obama supporter (with some caveats here and there), I would love to see Newt as the GOP nominee as it would assure an Obama victory, but if can’t be Gingrich, then Santorum would do just as well, maybe even better (from the Obama standpoint). I think we’d be looking at 400-plus electoral votes for sure for the POTUS.

From what I can tell, Santorum would have us return to the state of some of the Puritan colonies where wealth was an indication of God’s favor, and where you either practiced religion their way, or you went elsewhere.

The Ohio news is not particularly new, Santorum has been slightly ahead for several days now.

So here we go again with the latest flavor of the month, Mr. Santorum. Will HE be the salvation for the far right? If he pulls out in win in Michigan it could get interesting. If he wins in Ohio as well, then it gets very interesting. Romney is running out of firewalls. He’s a sure loser in Georgia and Pennsylvania with native sons still in the race. The other southern states look shakey. He’s yet to score anywhere in the midwest or Rocky Mountain states. The left coast voting is far into the future. He can’t do it with New England alone.

Romney is just not popular with Republicans so how can he expect to appeal to independents? In the general I don’t see how all this “liberal media” blather is going to help either Santorum or Gingrich. With an improving economy it doesn’t look good for the GOP. Doug suggest gasoline prices will have an effect. That can easily be countered by the dramatic drop in natural gas prices. It’s starting to look very good for the president.